Realism and Idealism - The revolutionary era

America's idealist crusade to minimize the country's role in
power politics was heavily influenced by the debates of eighteenth-century
British politicians, journalists, and pamphleteers. Despite the quarrel
between Britain and its American colonies after the Seven Years'
War (1756-1763), largely over Parliament's jurisdiction in
imperial, commercial, and political matters, the contestants were closely
linked intellectually. What troubled English critics of Britain's
role in European politics was the heavy burden of taxation, alliances, and
perennial wars demanded of Britain because of its continental connections.
By steering clear of such attachments, Britain could concentrate on the
pacific activities of trade and commerce, assigning the saved resources to
benign uses. Such arguments for reducing Britain's role in European
politics applied as well to America's ties with Britain.

Thomas Paine, above all other American writers, created the link between
English reformist thought and that of the colonies. Bankrupt and a failure
at everything he attempted, Paine immigrated to America in 1774. There he
quickly emerged as the chief pamphleteer for American independence. In his
famed essay
Common
Sense
(1776), Paine argued that America's attachment to Britain alone
endangered its security. It was the British connection that tended
"to involve this Continent in European wars and quarrels, and set
us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friendship, and
against whom we have neither anger nor complaint." More
specifically, Paine predicted that France and Spain, both New World
powers, would never be "our enemies as
Americans,
but as our being
subjects of Great Britain.
" An independent United States would have no cause to defy other
countries with demanding foreign policies. He assured his readers that
"our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us
the peace and friendship of Europe; because it is the interest of all
Europe to have America a free port." American independence would
symbolize the rejection of Europe and the entire system of power politics.
During the ratification debates regarding the U.S. Constitution a decade
later, the Antifederalists employed these isolationist arguments against
ratification, convinced that the oceans assured the country's
security without the Constitution's warmaking powers.

Paine's writings contained the fundamental assumptions of idealist
thought on foreign policy. For him the young republic, freed from the
contamination and constraints of power politics, appeared ideally
constituted to create a new order in world affairs. The American
Revolution, as a triumphant avowal of the principle of free government,
seemed an auspicious event in the eternal quest for peace and human
rights. "The cause of America," proclaimed Paine, "is
in great measure the cause of mankind." He regarded the institution
of monarchy the chief cause of human misery and war. "Man is not
the enemy of man," he wrote, "but through the medium of a
false system of government." How, he wondered, could the monarchies
of Europe, unable to satisfy the needs of their citizens, survive the
revolutionary pressures being unleashed by events in America? Those moral
principles, which allegedly maintained peaceful and just relations among
individuals, would, in time, rule the behavior of nations.

Other American contemporaries found Paine's views highly congenial.
Benjamin Franklin proclaimed such sentiments when, in April 1782, he said:
"Establishing the liberties of America will not only make that
people happy, but will have some effect in diminishing the misery of
those, who in other parts of the world groan under despotism, by rendering
it more circumspect, and inducing it to govern with a lighter
hand." Thomas Jefferson elaborated virtually identical views in
both his public and private observations. "I have sworn upon the
altar of God," he wrote, "eternal hostility against every
form of tyranny over the mind of man." For Jefferson, force was
evil unless informed by some moral purpose. But whereas Paine harbored
visions of an activist, messianic role for the United States in world
politics, Jefferson generally held to more modest aspirations. America
would best serve the interests of mankind by setting an example of purity
and perfection, and by offering an asylum for the wretched and oppressed.
"A single good government," he once wrote, "becomes a
blessing to the whole earth." James Madison, a contemporary
idealist, echoed the sentiment: "Our Country, if it does justice to
itself, will be the workshop of liberty to the Civilized World, and do
more than any other for the uncivilized."

Contemporary conservatives attacked as utopian Paine's idealist
notions regarding the world's future and America's role in
its creation. They knew that the United States could not project a
successful international crusade beyond the reach of American law. What
determined the external behavior of republics, they believed, was not the
uniqueness of their political structures or the outlook of their people,
but the international environment beyond their control, the demands
imposed by their own ambitions, and the countering requirements of other
states. James Madison, no less than others, denied that the foreign
policies of republics differed essentially from those of monarchies. Hard
experience had taught the revolutionary generation that nations dealt with
others solely on the bases of interests and the capacity to render them
effective.

Alexander Hamilton, in
The Federalist
(1788), questioned the assumption that commerce softened the manners of
men and extinguished "those inflammable humors which have so often
kindled into wars." He observed that nations responded more readily
to immediate interests than to general or humane considerations of policy.
He asked: "Have republics in practice been less addicted to war
than monarchies?…Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to
the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other
irregular and violent propensities?…Has commerce hitherto done any
thing more than change the objects of war?" Hamilton suggested that
Americans look to experience for answers to such questions. Carthage, a
commercial republic, was the aggressor in the very war that terminated its
existence. Holland, another trading republic, played a conspicuous role in
the wars of modern Europe—as did Britain, markedly addicted to
commerce. Hamilton concluded: "The cries of the nation and the
importunities of their representatives have, upon various occasions,
dragged their monarchs into war, or continued them in it, contrary to
their inclinations, and sometimes contrary to the real interests of the
state."

Hamilton dwelled on the dangers that the real world of power politics
posed for the United States. Some Americans, he warned, had been amused
too long by theories that promised them "an exemption from the
imperfections, weaknesses, and evils incident to society in every
shape." It would be better for the country to assume, as did all
other nations, that the happy empire of wisdom and virtue did not exist.
"To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of
independent, unconnected sovereignties…," he wrote in
The Federalist
No. 6, "would be to disregard the uniform course of human events,
and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of [the] ages."
Because constant disputes could lead to war, he concluded that national
safety required a strong central government, with a capacity to wage war
and advance common interests in a potentially hostile world. For him,
defense against the nation's external challenges lay in the powers
granted by the new U.S. Constitution.